Venue: Tobacco Factory Theatre   
Where: Bristol
Date Reviewed: 29 September 2009

Premiering here, Trestle's latest merges archetypal folk tale and a seemingly everyday story of modern migration in a clever and beautiful piece of theatre. Polish baker Olek gets on a bus for England even though the fiance who's supposed to go with him doesn't show up and he finds himself sharing gangway space with a naive mother intent on surprising her emigre son (not a good idea, it transpires), a witheringly superior wife-to-be who's convinced the Englishman she met one day in Krakow will provide her with a better life, and an "in-between man" whose need to earn a living means he rarely sees his wife and child. Meanwhile, a king exiles his errant daughter to the top of the glass mountain and gives potential suitors seven years to rescue her. Linking these stories, the four-strong cast bridge the yawning chasm between myth and motorway services with only stepladders, song and a series of neatly choreographed physical vinettes, shunting aside any threat of symbolic overload with a comedy Essex bus driver and the mock-heroic ascent of the glassy peak by a trio of doomed fiances. Sure, there's a whiff of the workshop here but, in the circumstances, that's no bad thing.

By Tom Phillips